Richard Shpuntoff

When tragedy strikes, 16 year old, América Campos is sent to Argentina to live with her anti-American grandmother Lucía América. América struggles to find her place with a grandmother she has never known and to hold onto a friendship with Sergio, a neighbor twice her age.

A bilingual documentary essay about the construction and illusions of American identity from an intimate, biographical and anecdotal perspective." I was born in New York City, a Jew from Queens, raised in the 1970s and 80s, the child of another New York Jew born in 1919, the child of immigrants from the Ukraine. When I became a father myself, I was gripped by the need to share this inheritance of identity with my daughters. But my daughters were born in Buenos Aires where I have been living since 2002.” Richard Shpuntoff

Julio Rivera, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican hustler, was murdered in a schoolyard in Jackson Heights, Queens on July 2, 1990, by three young men looking to clean up their neighborhood by 'stretching out a gay guy', but instead the murder sparked the coming out of New York's largest and until then most closeted LGBTQ community.